


Heart Made of Ice (and other lies the media prints)

by alpha_hydra



Series: I am Called Butterfly [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Brief Yuri P/OMC, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Yuri figuring out most of his issues, mom issues, with varying degrees of success
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 16:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10925520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpha_hydra/pseuds/alpha_hydra
Summary: Yuri Plisetsky thinks he's dealing with the shit-storm that is his life as best as he can. He doesn't need a support system when he can just wrap himself in his anger until it's the only thing he can feel, right?Prequel to In the Land of the Wanderers. Pls see notes for additional warnings





	Heart Made of Ice (and other lies the media prints)

**Author's Note:**

> A few things:  
> 1) set before/during [ In the Land of the Wanderers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9484745). Please read that before this one to avoid confustion.  
> 2) There are two very brief underage sex sections which earned this fic the "choose not to warn" tag. One is set before the start of YOI, and both are with individuals older than Yuri and have elements of dubcon. Neither of them are graphic and are not central to the story-telling, which is why I chose not to tag them.  
> 3) This was actually the beginning of the sequel to ItLotW, but had a significantly different tone than the following chapters (they're happy! I promise!!! Otabek is there for more than two scenes!!!), so I guess this is now part two of an ever evolving series.  
> 4) enjoy?

It starts with a phone call. 

Yuri hasn’t heard from his mother in more than five years, and then one day, out of the fucking blue, she calls him in the middle of the night and leaves a mysterious message in his voicemail. Her voice is gruff and slurred, and Yuri would bet his entire career on the fact that she was dead-ass drunk at the time. Yuri isn’t having any of it. He’s got the Grand Prix to worry about in just a couple of months, and thinks that he definitely has a shot of sweeping the trifecta of golds this year. How awesome would it be to have a neat row of gold metals from Grand Prix, Worlds, and Four Continents all aligned perfectly on his shelf?

He’d be sixteen by the time Worlds rolls around, but it’s never been done in someone’s debut year, and it makes Yuri salivate for it.

He puts his mother out of his mind. He’s trained for it all his life, so it’s as easy as breathing now. He doesn’t even know if he still remembers her face, in all honesty. It’s not like she’s ever _been here_. Yuri doesn’t give a shit what she does with her life. He doesn’t need her, and he hasn’t needed her for the last five fucking years of his life.

He deletes his call history, and gets a restless night’s sleep. He’s got a plane to Barcelona to catch.

*

The first-time Yuri has sex, he is about a month away from fifteen and has room in his head only for his senior debut next season. He’s tired of everyone treating him like a child; he’s just won gold in the Youth circuit for the third year in a row, that’s got to mean he’s mature, right? He is not above arguing for the sake of arguing with anybody who comes within ear shot about it.

In fact, the only person he’s met so far who doesn’t treat him like a kid is the eighteen-year-old who took silver that year at the Junior European Championship. He actually smiles at Yuri while they are receiving their metals and says “Good job, Plisetsky. You earned it.”

Yuri has no idea what to say to that, so he continues to smile a crooked smile at the cameras flashing in his face.

“Whatever,” he finally says when they are skating their way back off the ice.

“Call me some time,” the boy says later at the gala, and pushes a slip of paper into his hands. “We could have fun together.”

When he looks at the slip of paper on the long flight back to St. Petersburg, Yuri is surprised to see that the kid’s country code is Russia too. It makes it easier to call him without attracting his anyone’s attention, at any rate. 

The Eighteen-year-old whose name Yuri doesn’t really know turns out to live in St. Petersburg when he’s not training somewhere else, and so through a series of texts Yuri ends up on a date with him and tries not to let his enthusiasm show too hard. 

They go watch a shit movie that Yuri doesn’t remember because Silver-Medal sneaks him a few sips of whiskey before going into the movie theater. It’s shitty and Yuri isn’t having a good time until he feels Silver-Medal’s clammy hands against his thigh. Yuri turns to him, startled, and the guy swoops in and kisses him, a mess of wide lips and slippery saliva that Yuri doesn’t really like but can’t find the words to say no to. 

So they leave in a rush, but it turns out the media is already waiting for him, because there isn’t enough actual news in fucking St. Petersburg that Yuri Plisetsky’s torrid love life doesn’t become the hot fucking topic. Yuri scowls heavily, but Silver-Medal takes one look at the tiny cluster of humans and throws them the fig, his thumb pushed between his first and second fingers.

“Fuck you,” Silver-Medal says to the crowd, and they all go slightly ballistic.

Yuri is stunned into silence, and follows Silver-Medal all the way to his shitty car, and the only genuine emotion he feels that night is when he slams the door to the car shut and Silver-Medal turns the ignition. 

“I fucking hate the press,” he says, and Yuri nods along, a warm curl of…something…giving him a confidence he doesn’t really feel.

“Yeah,” Yuri agrees.

Which is how he lets Silver-Medal fuck him into the kid’s shitty couch, with the lights half-dimmed and the stale odor of Vodka almost strangling him. 

It’s shitty, and Yuri wonders why people fucking bother doing that if it doesn’t even feel good when Silver Medal starts pulling his clothes back on. 

“We should get you home,” he says, and Yuri pulls up his pants (he hadn’t even lost his shirt in that whole affair, what the fuck), and ignores the slimy drip of the guy’s come down his thigh. 

“Yeah, whatever,” Yuri says.

The guy never texts him back, and three weeks later, Yuri sees his name splashed all over the tabloids, with phrases like _statutory rape_ and _child pornography_ drawn in heavy red ink all over his face.

“What a fucking scum bag,” Yuri mumbles, and throws the man at the newsstand a hundred rubles for the paper he tucks under his arm.

The only plus side of that whole fiasco is that he gets checked for STDs sometime before Viktor disappears. He tells everyone he’s going to an eye exam, gets a taxi to a shopping center half a kilometer away, and walks to the clinic with his hood pulled low over his head. He doesn’t want to get caught. If anyone at the clinic is fazed by a fourteen-year-old coming in for STD screenings, they don’t let it show. He gets way too much information from the helpful nurses about “anal intercourse between two consenting homosexual adults” while he waits, and a stack of brightly colored papers about safe sex and consent when he comes back for his results. He wants the floor to swallow him up the whole time, of course, but keeps their stupid pink and purple pamphlets, reassured that good sex should actually feel fucking good. 

Plus, he’s STD and STI free, so that’s a plus. 

*

(Almost a month after that, when Yuri first hears about Viktor fucking off to Japan of all places for a booty call, the whole story resurfaces again, and Yuri’s name starts getting thrown into the mix. Fuck if he wants to deal with any of that, so he buys a plane ticket and hopes no one will give a damn by the time he and Viktor get back.)

*

Yuri’s debut season doesn’t go precisely as planned, because Viktor gets obsessed with Katsuki Yuuri and somehow gets the washed-up pig to give him an actual challenge. He still gets the gold at the Grand Prix though, which is all Yuri really cares about. Plus, he thinks he finds something like friendship in between all of the fighting he does with Katsudon. And he definitely makes at least one friend, who is blunt and straightforward and actually fucking _asked_ to be Yuri’s friend, like it’s some kind of privilege or something.

Yuri has never been asked to be someone’s friend before. Mostly, he talks to people because he’s required to. His friendship with Mila grew out of a pact of mutually assured destruction three years ago, and Yuri suspects that Georgi had no real friends, so he’s always hung around Mila until he gets the confidence to talk to people. Maybe, if threatened under gunpoint, he would admit that they’ve grown on him, like an invasive species of weed that he’s never managed to cull. Maybe. 

But this thing with Otabek is so fucking _easy._ He doesn’t think he’s ever felt anything like it. Except, maybe, when he was first watching Viktor Nikiforov walk off the ice and look at him as something approaching an equal. But Viktor can fucking burn as far as Yuri is concerned; Yuri wants nothing to do with him and his shitty decision making skills, less so with the fucking Katsudon that Yuri was so hopeful wouldn’t end up disappointing him like all his other idols. Fuck them both. 

But he has a point. This train of thought is about Otabek Altin, Hero of Kazakhstan and how Yuri was lucky enough to snag such a cool best friend.

Plus, he is like, the hottest thing Yuri has ever seen in his life. The first time he ever Skypes Otabek, it’s got to be like, mid-fucking-afternoon, and Otabek blinks up at him with these sleepy brown eyes and a warm little smile on his lips and, just. Yuri’s brain short circuits. He can see Otabek’s collar bone, what is that guy playing at?

Yuri wants to climb him like a fucking tree, and sometimes he catches the way Otabek is staring at him, late at night thousands of miles away through his computer screen, and thinks that maybe it’s not all a one-sided feeling.

So Yuri spends a long time trying to figure out what Otabek’s deal is, except sometime in January he apparently starts dating his roommate, Leo “can’t land a quad to save his life” de la Iglesia and Yuri’s entire fucking world slips on its axis. Otabek posts a picture to Instagram that looks like a postcard of literally anyone’s idea of The Perfect Date and just. Yuri forgets how to breathe for a minute. He’d thought—well, he thinks a lot of things, but none of them are apparently possible now. 

He throws his phone at his closet that night and gets maybe thirty minutes of sleep in-between cursing everything in existence.

The only thing that makes it up to him is that Otabek sends him pictures of a dumb t-shirt with a Statue of Liberty cat on it, and Yuri immediately loves it and starts looking for anywhere that he can find it online. It’s a fruitless mission, but it proves that Otabek is still thinking of him, so it has to mean something. He thinks.

He gathers a lot of clues over the coming weeks, and just enough clues to suggest Otabek and Leo are the hot new It-couple to make him doubtful. Through it all, at least, he and Otabek find a way to fit into each other’s empty spaces. Yuri will never admit how much that means to him. 

*

Then again.

Yuri downloads the Tindr app, lies about his age, and finds some rando who will fuck him in the span of a week following Otabek’s Statue of Liberty date. He has to assure the jackass three times that he’s the age of consent, which is rich considering the bastard said he was twenty but looks closer to seventeen himself. They go on a date and Yuri lets the guy take one selfie if he promises not to put it on social media.

He laughs about it and stuffs his phone into his pocket.

“Of course not!” the guy says, and when they get back to his apartment, they get drunk, and Yuri lets him fuck him. It’s at least better than Silver-Medal, who swore up and down it was supposed to hurt the first time, and this guy actually puts on a condom too, so there’s that. 

(He never really learns the guy’s name.)

But hey, at least the asshole never puts that photo on Instagram. No. What he does with it is actually worse.

Because three days later Yuri sees that fucking selfie in every single one of those shitty sports articles, both online and on those magazine stands he passes to get to the rink. One of them is entitled: _Is Yuri Plisetsky into Older Men??? The Truth Will Shock You!_

Yuri sees red. 

He doesn’t think he ever wants to see the look on Lilia’s face when he’d walked into the rink, and she was holding a copy of that same magazine while everyone else tried really hard to pretend they didn’t exist. 

*

After that, things go downhill very quickly.

*

Two weeks after that mess, he gets a call from a stranger that says they are his grandfather’s primary doctor. It 16:55 on a Tuesday evening, and Yuri has just waved away Yakov’s irritated monologue. They tell him in a very reasonable voice that his grandfather has had a stroke. 

The universe condenses to the sound of his own breathing.

“We have you down as his next of kin,” the voice is saying, but Yuri isn’t listening. 

He focuses instead on the sound of his own breath, the way Otabek taught him once over skype. He breathes and breathes and breathes until finally, finally, he breathes out and the universe falls back into place. He’s left dizzy and slightly nauseated. 

“What can I do?” Yuri asks finally, when he thinks his brain has caught up with him. 

“He’s in stable condition,” the voice on the other end of the phone says. “The doctors expect to discharge him by the end of the week. He was very, very lucky, Mr. Plisetsky. Almost no brain damage to speak of. The most you could do would be to keep him company.”

“I’m in St. Petersburg,” Yuri says, and it feels like a death sentence. 

There is a short pause on the other end of the line, the sound of papers shuffling.

“I see,” the voice says. “I know that a trip like that would be difficult for a young man such as yourself to make on short notice. I also understand that there’s a relative who has been in to see him recently, so I’m sure he will be in good hands if you can’t make it out to see him.”

“A relative?”

“His daughter-in-law, I believe.”

The ringing takes up residence in his head again, and he isn’t even aware of the end of the conversation. He thinks about the words “daughter-in-law,” and knows it can only mean one person.

“Daughter-in-law,” Yuri says into the silence. He’s lucky no one is paying him any attention, because his voice in that moment sounds small and lost. “What a load of shit.”

*

The first thing he does after that awful call is phone Otabek, although he knows even before it finishes ringing that he won’t answer. Otabek keeps his phone in his locker on most days when he’s at practice, unless Yuri is suffering from a bout of insomnia before he goes in. The ringing in his head has quieted for a moment, long enough to throw his phone back into the pile of his jackets, to count to ten in an attempt to quell the frustration and helplessness forming in the pit of his stomach, and start pulling at the laces of his skates.

In all fairness, he means to tell Otabek that night. Four Continents is a little under a week away, and Yuri stays up later and later, watching terrible youtube videos to keep the stress at bay until Otabek gets home. He stares at the screen of his phone as the minutes slowly tick by. 

He gets distracted looking up plane tickets to Moscow, and then hotels in Moscow, and then embarrassingly, plane tickets to New York City while he’s at the website, checking his skype window every few minutes to see if Otabek’s icon has switched from grey to green. Otabek’s stupid postcard with the adorable cats on the front arrived in the mail yesterday, and he’s been driving himself crazy trying to parse out any hidden messages from the short note.

_Thinking of you, Otabek_

Yuri stares at that line for so long he thinks his eyes might cross. Did it mean anything?

Ten minutes later, he’s staring at Otabek’s face instead as he sits on his couch and eats a large bowl of cereal for dinner. He looks—

He looks happy. 

Something weird happens in Yuri’s chest, so when Otabek smiles at him and asks how his day went, Yuri—well. He lies.

“Boring,” he says, and can hear the tiny catch in his breath when Otabek watches him with piercing eyes for a moment. He looks like he knows Yuri is lying, and is trying to figure out why.

“Okay,” he says, and takes a bite of his fruit loops. Then, when Yuri thinks he’s free, he adds, “You called me today during practice.”

There’s a question hanging on to the end of the sentence, something Otabek doesn’t need to add, something like an accusation. Yuri fights back the instinctive need to deflect.

“Yeah,” he says, failing spectacularly at acting cool. He crosses his arms, watches Otabek’s eyebrow as it rises, the way his eyes drift to Yuri’s shoulders, along the line of his neck. Yuri blushes fiercely. “So, what? It’s not important.”

Otabek is silent for so long that some of Yuri’s preemptive anger starts to fizzle out, leaving him feeling guilty. He wants to say, _everything is shitty. I need to get to Moscow but I don’t have time before the 4CC. What should I do?_

“You sure?” 

_No._

“Yes, just drop it,” is what he ends up snapping instead. 

He looks away, feels the beginnings of tears start to prickle in the corners of his eyes. _I need help_. He thinks it so loudly that for a moment there is nothing in his head but those words, and from the way Otabek watches him, he’s half-convinced Otabek hears them too. So, he takes a deep breath and clamps down on the feeling with every ounce of self-control he has.

“Tell me about your day,” Yuri says once he’s sure his voice won’t shake with the emotion. 

And Otabek does; he tells him that Leo dragged him shopping during their lunch break, and he holds up a pair of wickedly cool headphones that Yuri can’t help but salivate over. And he swallows away the feeling in his stomach, because Otabek is laughing at whatever is on Yuri’s face right now, and he likes the sound so much that it almost fixes everything on its own.

*

The next day, he is a piece of shit on the ice. He’s never been one to flub jumps like Katsudon, and so it becomes painfully obvious to anyone watching that there’s something big on his mind. He hopes no one’s watching. Hopes he can just get through without anyone thinking they need to criticize him today. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to handle it if someone does. 

So, of course someone corners him after lunch. Of course, it has to be Yuuri I-am-a-pork-cutlet-bowl-fatale Katsuki who watches him from behind his stupid glasses while Viktor tries to act cool not two meters away. Everyone else is pretending to casually keep their distance, which Yuri thinks is a load of shit; they are all wild gossips. He’s sure Mila and Georgi are practically dying to hear all of Yuri’s drama. Well, they’re never gonna hear it from him, that’s for sure.

“It’s not your fucking business,” Yuri says before Katsudon can even get a word in.

“We’re just worried, Yurio,” he says, and Yuri dies a little, inside. 

Viktor takes that sentence as a cue to rush to Katsudon’s side, wraps his arm around his shoulder and fixes Yuri with one of his tragically earnest smiles. 

“Is it about that Kazakh skater?” Viktor asks. “Has he broken your heart?”

“What? No,” Yuri practically shouts.

“That boy is nineteen, Viktor,” Katsudon says, frowning. “He shouldn’t be going after someone Yurio’s age.”

“He’s only _barely_ nineteen!” Yuri shouts before he can help it. “and besides, Otabek is my friend,” he adds like a crazy person, growling. Viktor winks at him while Katsudon keeps frowning. Yuri has a moment where his embarrassment almost beats out the anger, and he considers running. Then another where he considers telling Katsudon about the eighteen-year-old who’d taken his virginity almost two years ago now. He’s sure his face is beet red when he finally manages to shout: “This isn’t about Otabek! This is about my Dedushka.”

Just like that, the mood shifts. His embarrassment and anger crumble into a worried grittiness in the pit of his stomach. Viktor’s smile melts, and he takes a step closer, like he wants to give Yuri a hug. He might kill the man if he does.

“Something’s happened to Nikolai?” Viktor asks.

Yuri nods, thinking about the call he got yesterday. For a moment, the world seems to shrink and tilt around him, like he’s looking at everything with a fisheye lens. It’s harder to breathe.

“He had a stroke. They’re discharging him from the hospital on Monday—”

“And you want to go to Moscow,” Katsudon finishes for him shrewdly.

“Yeah,” Yuri concedes. He’d been debating it all last night, but now that he’s able to say it aloud, it seems like the only possible answer. “I can’t go to South Korea without seeing him. What if—What if…”

Yuri stops, because he can’t actually bring himself to finish that sentence. Dedushka can’t. The doctor had said he was fine. There’s no way he could possibly leave Yuri alone in this world. 

“Yurio?” Katsudon says gently. Yuri notices that they both seem much closer than they had moments ago. He wonders when they moved. “We’ll book you a flight tonight.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Viktor says, and then leaps in for a crushing hug. 

“Hey!” Yuri says, but after a moment Katsudon joins in, and Yuri has no choice but to suffer through this embarrassment. “You two are the worst.”

But to his unending torment, even Yuri can hear the fondness buried down under the frustration. He scowls and bears the hug for another precious few seconds before pushing them away. 

“I’m getting back on the ice,” he bites out.

Katsudon already has his phone out while Viktor waves Yuri away with a teary gaze. 

“We’ll join you in a few minutes,” Katsudon says, and has to bodily drag Viktor away while murmuring something under his breath. 

Yuri takes the next five minutes to get his breathing back under control. For some reason, it feels like he’s run a marathon and is practically panting for breath. The world tilts again, and for the moment, everything is facing the right way up.

Katsudon emails him a confirmation with details about his flight to Moscow an hour later. 

“We’ll drive you there tomorrow before practice,” Katsudon says, which is stupid considering Yuri’s pretty sure Katsudon doesn’t have a driver’s license. Then again, Viktor is nodding along serenely behind him. “Be ready by 5:15am.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Telling Yakov is about 100 times easier after that, not just because he has the proof of his flight clutched tight in his hand. Even so, it’s not until the end of practice that Yuri manages to string up the courage to tell him. Yakov has always been better about not flinging his emotions around; it’s part of the reason they get along somewhat. So, when Yuri explains to him in as even a voice as he can what the situation is, Yakov only frowns.

“You’ll have to check yourself in at Gangneung, then,” Yakov says. “I’ll have Lilia send you all that information.”

“Whatever,” Yuri says, shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket. 

“Let me know how Nikolai is doing,” he adds as Yuri is walking away. “He was a good friend of mine, growing up.”

Yuri clenches his jaw, breathes through his nose. 

“Okay,” he says, without turning around.

“Stay safe, Yurochka,” Yakov says in a voice that has no business sounding so worried, and Yuri nearly runs out the door to avoid the feelings it gives him. 

*

When Yuri was eight, he’d asked his mother why his father wasn’t around. He remembers that it was a warm day towards the beginning of summer; he’d been looking forward to going back to school. She’d sighed, and looked away from the book she’d been reading on the couch. 

“Oh, Yurochka,” she said. “Sometimes you can be so in love with someone, that you do things before you understand their consequences.”

Yuri hadn’t known what she meant, and when he said as much, she turned to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Yuri remembers that the room was heavy with the smell of her Chanel perfume, a smell that clung to the fabric of the couch cushions long after she’d left.

“Love sometimes just isn’t enough,” she said, and Yuri had to look away when he noticed that a tear had slipped down her cheeks.

 

Now, Yuri’s no expert at parenting or anything, but even he knows that’s one shitty thing to say to a kid. 

It’s also the only thing he can think of when he walks into the hospital the afternoon Dedushka is scheduled to be released and sees her pacing in the waiting room. Up and down, up and down, like a caged lion. She looks at him with her bright green eyes and all Yuri can think is _Love sometimes just isn’t enough_. He feels a tightness in his throat that he hadn’t expected; hides the soft, tender feelings behind a scowl.

“Yurochka,” she says and Yuri thinks she has no business sounding so happy to see him, considering she’s the one who left him.

“Maya,” he says, just to see the word inflict some damage onto her smiling face.

He’s not disappointed; her face seems to crumple in on itself. Good. She doesn’t deserve him calling her Mother like nothing’s happened, like she hadn’t dropped him and Dedushka the second she could. 

“I was just going to get Nikolai,” she says, stuttering over a few of her words.

For a second, Yuri almost believes her, too.

“Why were you pacing, then?” Yuri asks. He takes a couple of steps forward because several of the other patients are watching them curiously. The last thing Yuri needs is for this to get leaked to the press too. “It looked to me like you were thinking about running again.”

“No!” she says too quickly. Yuri knows it for the lie it is, and hates himself a little when he sees his own sheepish grimace reflected on his mother’s face. It’s not fair. There should be nothing of this woman that Yuri recognizes in himself. “Well. Maybe I was. But I won’t. I’m not leaving him now.”

“Sure,” Yuri scoffs, then blows by her and into the long hallway of hospital rooms, knowing that she’ll follow. “Whatever you say.”

“You look well,” she says from behind him. 

Yuri scoffs, unwilling to play the game of niceties with her.

“So you told them you actually married my shitty father, then? Is that the only way they’d let you in to see him?”

“Yes,” Maya says, and manages to catch up to him just enough to overtake him and block the way forward. Yuri grinds his teeth. “What does it matter? He has no one else.”

“He has me,” Yuri hisses at her, then pushes past her and into a hallway that looks like it might have the elevators he wants. 

Yuri doesn’t care if she follows him or not; _he doesn’t_. But the clicking of her heels just a few steps away follows, and Yuri tries hard not to get his hopes up with it.

Dedushka’s room is on the fifth floor; Yuri hates to admit it, but he would have gotten lost if Maya hadn’t shown him where it was. They get there, and Yuri takes a moment to breathe before he pushes open the door. Dedushka looks like he always does, already he’s in his street clothes and tapping his fingers on his knee impatiently. Yuri is so happy to see him he nearly bursts into tears. He looks so normal. Like nothing bad has happened at all. Like nothing bad could possibly happen. Dedushka looks at him and smiles, soft and wondering.

“Slava,” he says, and Yuri’s heart drops. “What are you doing here?”

“I,” Yuri says, but finds that he can’t continue. He blinks back tears and is ashamed when he looks at Maya for help. 

“That’s not Slava, Nikolai,” she says gently. “It’s Yuri Vyacheslavovich Plisetsky. Your grandson.”

“Of course,” Dedushka says, and rubs the back of his head. He looks confused for a second, and Yuri wants to run as far away as he can. “Of course, I know my Yurochka.” 

Yuri manages a small, lopsided smile, and says (in a voice that hardly wavers): “We came to bring you home, Dedushka.”

“Good. I hate all this hospital food,” he says, and waits with surprising patience while Maya clears the last of his paperwork with the doctors. 

Yuri sits in the back of Maya’s car, a smaller, white, electric thing that is nothing like Dedushka’s car, and concentrates on his breathing on the long drive back. 

*

Yuri is drowning. It’s like. Like there’s a black hole somewhere in the pit of his stomach, and it pulls and pulls at him until it eats him from the inside out. He doesn’t know what to do with so much emotion. They get to Dedushka’s house and Yuri sees that it’s exactly the same as when he left it just this season. He thinks it’s impossible that the house could remain so unchanged when his Dedushka nearly _died_.

Then they go inside, and Yuri sees a pair of women’s house slippers by the front door, and a coat rack that didn’t used to belong with a tan trench coat hanging off one of the hooks. He breathes in the long-forgotten smell of Chanel and can’t take a step for a second, watches the drab walls as they inch closer and closer around him.

“How long have you been here?” Yuri asks, and is proud when he doesn’t even sound affected.

“Since before the Grand Prix,” she says, steering Dedushka to his favorite chair. She looks at him, and something crosses her face that Yuri doesn’t want to think about. It’s soft, and makes Yuri’s heart clench painfully. “I called you. The night before I showed up here at Nikolai’s door. I. I don’t know if you got my message.”

The silence stretches for so long that Yuri feels it like icy barbs of steel across his back. All the soft, painful emotions vanish in a wisp of smoke, and the familiar anger flushes to his face.

“No,” Yuri lies, because he doesn’t want to have this conversation. Not right now, with Dedushka taking off his shoes and resting his hands on his knees like even the short walk from the car was enough to tire him out. “I didn’t.”

“Oh,” she says, and Yuri turns away from her because he can hear the hurt in her voice, and it does nothing to make him feel better. 

If anything, it makes him feel worse.

“I’ll go start on dinner,” he says, and drops his duffel bag full of clothes and shit where he stands before he escapes into the kitchen. 

*

Dedushka calls him ‘Slava’ three more times that night, and does it on and off over the course of his stay. Yuri wants to throw things. He wants to shout that he doesn’t even look like his fucking father anyway; that he looks like Maya! And that Dedushka’s raised Yuri since Yuri first thought he could be a professional figure skater, so: the only part of his life that actually matters. He wants to break every single photograph of his fucking dad that’s kept preserved on Dedushka’s mantle, he wants—

But always, Dedushka will close his eyes and puzzle his way through it, and say in a voice that sounds heartbroken, “I’m sorry, Yurochka. I won’t do it again,” and Yuri’s anger? It just deflates, and leaves him feeling hollowed out and empty. 

“It’s okay, Dedushka,” he will always say, and hates everything in his life so fiercely he wants to cry, “Let’s just watch some TV, okay?”

*

Yuri is lucky that there’s only a handful of days before Four Continents. He texts Otabek every day and comes up with excuses about why he can’t skype face-to-face. He isn’t entirely sure Otabek believes him, but he’s too polite to call Yuri out. Yuri boards a flight from Moscow to Gangneung with the memory of his Dedushka’s laughter ringing in his ears, and thinks that he’s probably gone through the worst of it by now.

Otabek tells him that everything is going to be okay, but he can’t possibly know that. He can’t possibly know all the little things that could go wrong. Yuri nearly drives himself crazy thinking about them while waiting for his flight and getting upset that Otabek doesn’t understand that. Then he has to spend the first twenty minutes of the flight with his head between his knees because it suddenly becomes impossible to breathe, and the world won’t quite stop spinning.

It’s not a good omen. 

*

Yuri crashes and burns at Four Continents. He comes in _fourth fucking place_ , and all he can think about when he’s looking at his scores is how he was doing it all for Dedushka, how he’d be so disappointed if he was watching right now. There’s a hollow ringing sound in his ears as Yakov and Lillia say words that Yuri has no idea how to decipher. A hand on his shoulder that could be Yakov or could be Viktor or could be anyone in the fucking world for all Yuri could care. He thinks the same words over and over, until they become a whirlwind in his mind. 

_I failed him._

The sharp clicking sound of flashbulbs are what pull him out of himself. He blinks and finds that at some point, he’s moved away from the kiss and cry and is standing at the edge of the press box, Yakov having long since abandoned him. Someone asks him a question, and Yuri doesn’t even hear it; he says something that sounds warped and three octaves lower than his own voice, and when he hears the tremble in there, a crushing wave of panic goes over him. He has to leave.

He all but storms away, and when one of the stupid guys with flashing cameras comes at him, Yuri lets out a wailing screech and rips the expensive piece of equipment out of his hands and flings it as far away as he can. 

Then Yuri gets wildly, smashingly drunk, and he hardly remembers what happens next. 

(This is a lie. He does get drunk on the cheap, little bottles of liquor the hotel puts in his fridge, but he remembers all of it with a stunning clarity, moreso than the actual 4CC competition. He remembers wrapping himself up in his anger until he was white-hot with rage, until there was nothing but a blaze radiating outward from him. He remembers the seductive pull of invincibility, how he’d run outside thinking he’d kick some trashcans until he saw an old, metal baseball bat sitting in an alley and had a shivery moment of clarity as the idea sprung into his mind. He remembers feeling dangerous, and reckless, and the wonderful calming balm: the heft of a weapon in his hands.

He remembers the satisfying crash of glass as he ruins his reputation, and the scariest thing of all: he remembers thinking that it was the best feeling in the world.)

*

The next day, the world feels like it’s literally ending. He wakes up with a wicked hangover, still in the clothes from yesterday and really angry-sounding pounding at his door. There are a total of fifteen missed calls on his phone, five from Yakov, three from Yuri, two from Viktor, four from Otabek, and a single call from Lillia. There are about a million notifications from every single social media app Yuri has on his phone, and instead of dealing with any of it, he just turns the thing off and drops it into his pocket. 

He crawls out of bed and yanks open his door to find both Yakov and Lilia looming over him like a pair of matching death-gods. Yakov has a Korean newspaper with a picture of the smashed-in doors of the skating rink on it. 

Fuck.

“Do you have anything to say about this, Yuri?” Lilia asks in a deceptively reasonable tone of voice.

Yuri thinks about playing dumb for all of five seconds before Yakov pipes in.

“There’s a video of this on the internet already,” he adds as if reading Yuri’s mind.

In a rush, Yuri remembers chasing after some nameless Korean kid who must have followed him out to the skating rink yesterday, and he feels nauseous. He wonders what he would have done if he’d actually caught up with the punk. Did he still have the bat at the time? Yuri panics because he can’t remember. Was he angry enough to really hurt someone like that? 

Yuri feels the answer in the back of his throat.

“I’m going to be sick,” he says reasonably, and then vomits all over the doorway and onto Lilia’s expensive shoes.

Yup, definitely the end of the world.

Yakov and Lilia yell at him for nearly thirty minutes before Viktor and Katsudon show up, each wearing matching worried frowns. Yuri wants to tell them both to fuck off, but all of his anger seems to have been bled out of him. Maybe it’s the hangover talking, but all he wants to do now is crawl into bed and never leave again. 

“We’ll talk about this in St. Petersburg,” Yakov warns ominously after another hour or so of yelling, this time mixed in with blaming Katsudon and Viktor for not watching him better. “Your flight is in six hours. I expect to see you at the airport in three hours’ time.”

Then he storms out of the room like the original drama queen, Lilia sending him one last, disapproving look before she follows after him. The silence they leave behind is deafening.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Yuri says before either Katsudon or Viktor can say a word. 

“We’re just worried, Yurio,” Katsudon says.

“That’s not my name,” he says reflexively, then finally gives in to temptation and collapses onto his bed. “Look. I’m tired. Can we not do this until we get back to St. Petersburg?”

“Yuri,” Viktor starts, and his voice is all wrong, it’s gone soft and caring and not at all like the self-centered asshole that Yuri knows. “We know you’re worried about Nikolai, but this isn’t—”

“Please,” Yuri says into his pillow. That stops Viktor short. He doesn’t think either of them has ever heard him say that word in their lives. “I can’t talk about it right now.”

And he absolutely _hates_ how honest his voice sounds, how much he sounds like he is feeling. Like he’ll rip apart at the seams like a poorly knitted scarf, like the edges of himself are vanishing and soon there’ll be nothing left.

“Okay,” Katsudon says into the silence. “But you have to promise you’ll talk to us when we see you next.”

“Fine, whatever,” Yuri mumbles into his pillow. “I promise.”

He closes his eyes. After a second, he feels a gentle hand on his shoulder, and Yuri won’t admit it, but something about the gesture makes a few stubborn tears leak out of his eyes. 

He only hears Katsudon and Viktor’s footsteps as they leave him, but their absence fills the room much more than Yakov’s yelling ever could.

*

Yuri gets a cab to the airport less than an hour later, after he indulges in a long cry, drinks almost a gallon of water, and starts to feel more like himself. He manages to get his ticket to St. Petersburg changed to one for Moscow by looking lost and afraid and like he needs protecting. 

(He may have worn the stupid cat ears he got at the Grand Prix and switched his leopard print jacket for the cream-colored cardigan Mila gave him last summer for maximum effect. He knows people think he looks like some kind of innocent, fey-child thing, okay? And if they want to think he’s some kind of angel, let them. Yuri’s more than willing to take advantage of it while he can.)

He keeps his phone off the whole ride back to Moscow; through the shitty cab ride to Dedushka’s house, up until he’s unlocking the front door, when Dedushka and Maya look up at him in surprise from their spots in the living room.

“I’m back,” he says.

“Oh, Yuri,” Maya breathes into the stillness.

Yuri can’t help it, he drops his bag to the floor with a clunk and hangs his head. He thinks about distance and time travel and if they’ve even bothered to watch the reruns of his failure. He finds he doesn’t give a single shit.

_“Mamulya,”_ he says, and only has time to take a deep breath before Maya is there, wrapping Yuri in a hug that he hasn’t felt in years.

“You skated wonderfully, Yurochka,” Dedushka’s voice says, much closer than he had been before, then Yuri feels his hand at the crown of his head. “You keep your chin up.”

Yuri nods, even though he can feel his ugly tears dropping down onto Maya’s fancy shirt. He brings his hands up and clenches at the hem of her blouse, the closest concession to hugging her he can give in this moment.

“You’re okay,” Maya whispers, and Yuri breathes in the scent of her Chanel perfume and lets himself believe the lie. 

*

That night, after Dedushka’s gone to bed, Yuri sits with Maya in the living room and tries to find his latent anger again. They’re not touching; Yuri is not equipped with enough emotional stability to let that happen again, but he does perch himself on the edge of the couch, about a foot away from her. It’s as much of a concession as he’s willing to give. 

Yuri’s mother looks nothing like what he remembers of her from Before. But then again, the last time he’d seen her before this month was just before starting his first summer camp with Yakov. A lot of time stood between him and her, and after three years, he’d stopped trying to remember the curve of her lips or the soft spill of her cornflower hair.

She’s dyed her hair a dark brown now, and it hangs in thick curly waves down her back. She’s smoking a cigarette that leaves a sharp, spicy scent in the air. She takes one last puff and puts it out, only half-smoked, in the glass ashtray to her left.

He wants to think about anything that will distract him from everything that’s happened, and the weirdly paranoid voice in his head that says he needs to check up on Dedushka every five minutes, just in case. So into the silence, he spits out:

“Why are you here, Maya?” and waits for the fallout. 

“I’ve been living with Nikolai since November,” she says immediately, like she’s been waiting for this question. “I stopped drinking, and wanted to tell him how sorry I was for everything. He said he could use some help around the house while I looked for work in Moscow, and. Well. I just stayed here, after that.”

Yuri boggles for a moment, thinking about the Rostelecom Cup. Had she been in Moscow at the time? Had she seen him perform? But that way is only madness and long abandoned hurt, so he pushes the thoughts away as roughly as he can.

“So you just out of the blue decided to come back to Moscow, after leaving us for my entire fucking life to—”

“I was young,” Maya is quick to interject. “We’d just received word that Slava had died overseas. We didn’t even know he’d joined the army. I didn’t know what to do.”

_“Not abandon your kid in St. Petersburg because the guy who walked out on ALL of us finally got himself killed!”_

Yuri takes a breath before he starts shouting again. The last thing he wants is Dedushka wandering in on this conversation after he’d finally gone to bed. 

“I know!” Maya says, low in her throat like it kills her a little. Yuri refuses to feel bad for her. “I was stupid. I felt like I spent that whole first year drunk, Yuri. It’s—” She looks up at him, and it’s only then that he realizes he’s stood, “It’s my biggest regret.”

“You could have come back,” Yuri says. “Anytime you wanted. No one was stopping you.”

“I did,” she shoots back. “I’m here now, aren’t I?” She looks up at him some more, looking ten years younger than she should and not at all like a mother. After all, she has no practice being one. She stands then; she’s only a few centimeters taller than him, he notes in a detached sort of way. “I know what I did was terrible, and wrong, and that there’s nothing I can say that will make it okay. But. I’m here now. And I just thought—”

“You just thought you could try this whole motherhood thing out for real,” Yuri says like he’s possessed. There’s a terrible bubble of hope in his chest that he is trying to hold down with all his might, and it’s warring with a preemptive anger. “Sure, whatever, you can try.”

“Yuri, please—”

But Yuri’s already climbing the stairs two at a time, shoving his hands into his pockets and ignoring the sting at the corners of his eyes as tears start to creep down his face.

 

*

It’s not until a day later that Yuri turns his phone back on, unable to resist the pull of the internet in his Dedushka’s wifi-less home. He ignores every single social media notification and refuses to listen to the no doubt staggering number of voicemails that have accumulated since leaving South Korea. He doesn’t even want to look at his texts, honestly, but then Otabek’s name pops up with a new unread message and. And if it had been anyone else he would have ignored it, but he doesn’t think he’s capable of ignoring Otabek, really; not in the way he’s been practicing his whole life. 

Which leads to Yuri scrolling up through Otabek’s worried monologue of 250 character texts, varying from _Yuri please answer your phone_ and _you’ll do better at worlds, okay?_ to _please be okay, Yura. Text me when you can._ Yuri clutches his phone to his chest, squashes the tiny tendril of joy down when he remembers all the lies he’s told by omission. 

He doesn’t deserve a friend like Otabek. So he stares at the most recent message ( _if you need anything, let me know, yeah?_ ) for so long his eyes start to water, and then he closes his messaging app, puts his phone on Do Not Disturb, and goes to find Dedushka.

*

He spends the next two weeks trying to avoid Maya, which turns out to be damn near impossible if he wants to spend any time with Dedushka at all. He’s already forgotten how different Dedushka’s modest, three-bedroom house is from the sprawling elegance of the Baranovskaya residence. If Yuri wanted (and had the free time), he could go days wandering through the cavernous hallways, without so much as spotting a housekeeper. 

He’s missing Otabek like a limb, and has started scrolling through his messages obsessively to keep away his masochistic loneliness. The moron keeps texting Yuri even though Yuri’s not made a single sign that he wants to hear from him, and Yuri is so pathetically grateful about it that he doesn’t know what to do with it.

Dedushka’s house gets smaller and smaller as the days pass and Yuri’s whole body starts to itch for the ice.

“Something’s bothering you, Yurochka,” Dedushka says on a Thursday afternoon. 

They’re sitting out on the front porch, Dedushka on his rocker and Yuri sprawled out on the front steps; he’s twirling his phone anxiously in his hands. Around them, a breeze sweeps by, a cold stream that licks down his back where he’s not wrapped his scarf properly. 

“It’s going to snow tonight,” Yuri says. 

He thinks about the text he’s typed out to Yakov; eight words that could mean all sorts of things Yuri doesn’t want to deal with right now. He hasn’t sent it because he’s too chicken.

_I don’t think I should go to Worlds_

The more he repeats the phrase in his head, the more it rings like a truth, nevermind the restelessness in his bones. That just scares the shit out of him. Only three months ago, he’d been ready to sweep the world off its feet. A senior debut with all three ISU championship medals, the perfect end to a perfect beginning. And now, here he is, thinking about dropping from one. He thinks about every other Russian fairy who’s come before him; none of them had more than one or two seasons of professional skating. Yuri had sworn on his life he’d never be one of them, but now? 

He tosses his phone up into the air, catches it in the palms of his hands, frowning. He hits send.

“It’s strange how time changes things,” Dedushka says in the mind-reading way old people the world over have of saying shit. 

“Sure,” Yuri mumbles, watching the little dots that is Yakov typing with a sort of sadistic apprehension. “Just six months ago, you thought you could eat all the pirozhki in the world.”

Dedushka lets out a bark of laughter that makes Yuri feel so inexplicably happy, he could leap for joy. 

“And now, a woman you don’t even know is claiming to be your mother again.”

Yuri turns back to Dedushka so fast he gives himself whiplash.

“What?”

“I’m old, Yurochka, not blind,” he says, then just stares out into the street for a few minutes, thinking.

Yuri turns away and does the same, unwilling to be the one to break the silence. It’s a dangerous game to play with a person who’s as taciturn as Dedushka, Yuri knows from experience. 

“You don’t want to be here,” Dedushka finally says. There’s not a hint of judgement in his voice, but Yuri still feels a stab of shame. “I understand why.”

“That’s not true,” but Yuri feels the truth ring deep inside him. 

His phone vibrates with a message from Yakov.

 

_So finally going to tell us where you’ve gone off to? If you think it’s best, we’ll pull you. Think about it._

 

“I know Maya wants you to give her a chance,” Dedushka continues. Yuri looks up at him sharply, the urge to flee from the conversation rising. “I want you to know you don’t have to.”

And that. That brings Yuri up short. He’d been expecting the “blood being thicker than water” bullshit, not Dedushka actually fucking agreeing with him. 

“Really?”

Dedushka nods. 

“Maya and Slava grew up together,” he says, and Yuri is pretty ashamed with how interested he is to hear about his parents’ past. He thought he was over this. “I’ve known how she can be. Maybe I can forgive her. Maybe I want someone in the house who reminds me of my son, or my grandson. That doesn’t mean you have to.”

“I didn’t think that would be your advice.”

“Why not?” Dedushka asks, and smacks his hands against the arms of his rocking chair. “When have I ever put anyone’s happiness before yours, Yurochka?”

“I—I don’t know,” Yuri says, and finds he can hardly get the words out. He’s staring at Dedushka with wide eyes, a lump forming in his throat. He thinks he’s cried more in these two weeks than his whole life combined. “Never?”

“Da,” Dedushka says, looking pleased with himself. “Now, what is it that’s really bothering you?”

“Dedushka,” Yuri says, and feels the traitorous tears slip down his cheeks. He crawls the meter of distance between them and attaches himself like a five-year-old to Dedushka’s leg. “I want to go to New York.”

The words are out of his mouth before he even has the time to think about the truth of them, but once out there, in the world, he realizes the truth of them. He needs to talk to Otabek, and after his colossal fuck up at Four Continents, he thinks it needs to be face-to-face.

“Then go to New York,” Dedushka says like it’s no big deal. He drops his hand onto the top of Yuri’s head, a warm, welcoming weight. “Then go to Finland.”

“For Worlds?” Yuri asks dumbly. He looks up at Dedushka, still surprised that after all these years, he actually knows the names of all the different competitions. 

“Why else would you go to Finland?” Dedushka retorts, and Yuri loves him so fiercely in that moment that he thinks he might burst from it. “Go win, and then maybe come back here. Then maybe make peace with Maya, or maybe not. You’ll know what you want after, I think.”

“Are you sure, Dedushka?” 

“I’m always sure,” he responds, and then Yuri jumps up and hugs him so hard that they fall out of the rocking chair. 

Maya yells at them for fifteen minutes and Yuri and Dedushka laugh themselves silly from the floor, and for the first time Yuri thinks that maybe, things will be okay after all.

*

That night, he books a flight to New York City with shaking fingers, and prays that Otabek is forgiving enough to at least hear Yuri out. He clutches Otabek’s kitten post-card tightly in his hand, and doesn’t think he loosens the hold until three days later. He’s gotten an Uber to the return address on the back scribbled in Otabek’s handwriting and waits for hours on the stoop, growing less and less sure of himself as the sun sinks behind the tall buildings. Eventually he hears Otabek’s voice a couple of blocks away saying his name so softly it almost sounds like a prayer.

Yuri doesn’t think; he runs over and throws his arms around him, smelling sweat and pistachio ice cream and exhaust from the traffic. Otabek’s arms are tight around his waist; a warm, solid comfort he doesn’t think he really deserves. He never wants to let go.

“Let’s go inside,” Otabek eventually says into Yuri’s ear.

An apology is hiding somewhere in Yuri’s mouth, but instead, he just watches as Otabek picks up his luggage and climbs the steps to the building. Yuri follows after, feeling just a little like Orpheus’ bride being led out of the underworld, and thinks that if Otabek turns around, Yuri might just disappear in a puff of smoke. He takes a deep breath. He can do this. Yuri has crashed and burned and somehow pulled himself out of the wreck of his ashes mostly in-tact. He can tell all of it to his best friend, if it means he gets to keep the soft way Otabek stares at him.

For Otabek, Yuri thinks he’d do just about anything. Yuri would give him the whole damn world if he asked for it. As it is, all he can offer right now are the broken, mixed up bits of himself that he hasn't quite figured out how to put back together. He hopes it'll be enough.


End file.
